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With Claus Guth directing and Simone Young on the podium, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden's new production of Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina proves that the past isn't really past. 

Irene Théorin and Andreas Schager lead a stunning musical performance, as Guy Cassiers vision of The Ring becomes clear.  

The Staatsoper Berlin celebrate the arrival of Michael Volle, a splendid Wotan, aided by a strong ensemble of singers and Daniel Barenboim's leadership.

Daniel Barenboim led a performance of deliberate tempo with a great ensemble of singers.  Guy Cassiers‘ production, while visually stunning at times, does little to enhance the performance.

Katya Apekisheva and friends made a persuasive case for Hummel's Piano Quintet to be heard as a transitional grand romantic concerto deserving of belonging in such august company.

With more than a hundred Academy students hanging over their seats at the side of the hall like their equivalents in The Red Shoes 70 years ago, nine of the world's finest musicians took on Schubert in Lisbon.

Evelyn Herlitzius and Adrianne Pieczonka are unsinkable in the the French director's final production, conducted with impressive symphonic sweep by Daniel Barenboim. 

The revival of Das Rheingold at Staatsoper Berlin was still marred by distracting use of dancers on stage, but musically it was a great success. 

Director Michael Thalheimer staging Weber’s Der Freischütz entirely in the Wolf’s Glen, albeit relocated from a “fearsome forest gorge” to what looks like a badger’s sett. 

Erratic tempi and unclear textures marr an otherwise engaging opportunity to hear a rarer Rachmaninov work alongside his evervescent Piano Concerto no. 2.

Earnest singing and dramatic insight made Das Rheingold with the Hong Kong Philharmonic a remarkable evening. 

Claus Guth gives the Staatsoper Berlin a Turn of the Screw unlike any other.

The world ended again last night. It ends fairly frequently in performances and in recordings, and that schedule tends to innoculate us against Richard Wagner’s political and philosophical messages. If ever there were to be a performance to transcend that, it would come at the Proms, at the conclusion of its first full performance of Der Ring des Nibelungen.

A Beethoven cycle last year, The Ring this year: what will Daniel Barenboim bring to the 2014 Proms? Perhaps, given the recent success of extracts both at the Proms and at Lincoln Center Festival, the smart money is on Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 29-hour, seven-opera cycle Licht. Then again, perhaps not.

“Poetry and again poetry – tenderness mixed with pain; sensuality, a drama surprising and burning, and a rocketing finale.” This is composer Giacomo Puccini describing one of the world’s most famous operas, La bohème.

Few conductors could hold an audience's applause whilst shaking hands with every member of the orchestra and then speaking extensively about politics. Daniel Barenboim, though, on completion of a week-long Beethoven cycle, did so and then dashed to the Olympic opening ceremony to bear the Olympic flag alongside Ban Ki-Moon, among others.